Philip Horne

1900 was the end of the 19th century but it wasn’t the end of the world, as we can see. Antonio Conselheiro, a religious leader in the Sertao, the harsh backlands of north-eastern Brazil, had predicted that it would be: ‘There shall be a great rain of stars, and that will be the end of the world. In 1900 the lights shall be put out.’ He was not there to see this prophecy belied; his own light had gone out on 22 September 1897, towards the end of a strange, grim piece of history. He had issued other, preliminary prophecies, among them the eerie sentence: ‘In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads.’ His resistance to the newly-established Brazilian Republic was based on passionate objections to the census, to metrication and to civil marriage. Conselheiro’s thousands of followers, the rebels of the Sertao, lived mentally as well as geographically apart from the rest of mankind. Others, including other Christians, would have to say of such beliefs, with the agnostic Wittgenstein: ‘I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures.’ So that perhaps, insofar as Conselheiro’s settlement of the faithful at Canudos lived in a world of its own, the apocalyptic prophecy carried a rough truth: for by October 1897, concluding a protracted campaign shockingly brutal on both sides, the Brazilian Army had brought that world to a close with cannon, carbine, dynamite and bayonet.

In his own words ‘a queer fish’, Sergei Eisenstein declares at one point in this 1946 memoir that he worked amphibiously, by extremes. ‘I create an arbitrary and capricious flood in my films. Then I endeavour to divide this flood with the dry beats of a metronome, according to its conformity with certain principles.’ Eisenstein’s dialectic of riot and order can stand as a prime instance of the way in which others have struggled to discipline, exorcise or justify their passionate relations with films. This powerful medium is still less than a hundred years old, its soundtracks less than sixty, its success with colour about fifty. We don’t yet know – or at least we don’t agree – how seriously to take it; but in its reduced form (television’s screens are on average 160 times smaller) most of us do take it somehow.’

Life and work are in the happiest relation when the life comfortably includes the work; the relation becomes unhappy when the work threatens to preclude the life. Then we have a competition between the demands of work and the duties of the domestic life, or the impulses of the inner life. The competition may be a matter of man-hours or of values, or both: at any rate the division, once established, exposes the individual to stress. Wemmick in Great Expectations has expressed his siege mentality in his moated home, a refuge from the Jaggers law-work: ‘the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me.’ Wemmick’s chiasmus reflects the two selves he has contrived for his places of abode and work; he does his job well, working as a different person with a different expression on his face. Melville’s Bartleby, in contrast, a few years earlier, quite withdraws his labour – also legal in character – and goes with mysterious politeness to a death in the New York Tombs: an enigmatic martyr, he seems to suffer from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying.’

Henry James was a perfectionist, though not a humourless one, about his public appearance and appearances: hence the pleasure taken by certain anecdotalists in showing him out of control – of situations, conversations, himself, others. That he danced a cake-walk in 1899 and was photographed with a mouthful of doughnut intrigues us, as a treasurable departure from the magisterial dignity we mainly like to impute to him. Cakewalk and doughnut were taken at a party at the Cranes’, a private affair. The Whole Family, which became a book at the end of 1908 after 12 months in Harper’s Bazar, is a public party game for Harper’s authors, an improvised collaboration (or sequence, rather, of solo turns). What, one asks, is the author of The Golden Bowl doing dans cette galère?’

‘Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.’ The weighty agonies and agonisings of Flaubert, most famously over the details of Madame Bovary, have made him an exemplary writer for other self-conscious writers, and this unlikely simile is quoted in a recent work testifying to that detailed interest: Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) made a clever novel out of a preoccupation with the minutiae of Flaubert’s life, inventing a biographer-narrator to fight a long rearguard action against the death of the author. Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy (first published in 1975, and only now translated into English) is the work of a novelist whose creative imagination more than equals that of Barnes in complexity and abundance: yet it is what is called, sometimes regrettably, ‘secondary literature’, and Llosa is there in what seems person more than persona, autobiographically forthcoming, to convey, through an impressive array of details, his notion of the meaning of a novel by which he is obsessed – Madame Bovary. His novelistic vocation is not too much narrowed in his operation as a critic: The Perpetual Orgy is an expansive and self-reflecting book, a generously-ranging consideration of what fiction does and is for, and its critical reconstruction of Flaubert’s hampered processes of composition shows a convincing insight and a grasp of detail like those of Llosa’s fiction.’